by Rebecca Sherman
We’ve forged somewhat of a sacred bond; my Notes app and me, that is. It’s the kind of relationship that has left my journal jealous, forsaken at my bedside, after a stream of nights deciding I’m too tired to recollect my thoughts from the day.
But my Notes app is always with me, a catalog of the most defining parts of myself.
It reminds me what groceries I need when I miss an aisle at Whole Foods, or how much my friends owe me after spoiling ourselves with a middle-of-the-night visit to South Street Diner. Its depths preserve lyrics that make me smile, fragments of incomplete poems, questions from friends written in bars when I couldn’t hear what they were asking. Passwords. Recommendations. It carries blips of gratitude recorded on T rides and bursts of anxiety from sleepless nights.
Years of my life captured in Helvetica font.
My Notes app keeps me honest, perhaps more than my journal ever has. When I stare at my journal, pen in hand, I feel its blank pages demanding a confession. I love to write, but I hate recording events as they’re happening to me. As if I’m being acted upon. Such a process makes me feel like I’m recounting my life instead of living it for myself.
My journal has too much space waiting to be filled with terrifying permanence.
But my Notes app isn’t so demanding. It’s always there when I need it for reminders or reassurance, unwaveringly patient. Of all the apps on my phone, my Notes app feels exclusively for me.
When I open social media these days, I dive into someone else’s life. Their personal experiences, their qualms and questions. This isn’t a new phenomenon, obviously. Social media has always been used to share, but more recently it seems to have introduced an epidemic of oversharing. I know what the annoying boy in the back of my friend’s class said to grievously irk her, as well as what brand of chips some West Coast stranger ate for her “girl dinner.”
I can’t comment on this trend without admitting that I am guilty of participating in it. Sometimes I have to hold myself back from sending too many memes too quickly to my best friends, giving myself intervals to bombard them with someone else’s jokes. I’ve also dramatically cut how often I post on my Close Friends Story, where I would relentlessly share my thoughts throughout the day. None of my friends needed to know of my steadfast conviction that Jeremy Allan White looks identical to Phineas of Phineas & Ferb, but it felt like an important realization at the time.
There are many parts of myself I won’t share with my personal journal, but certain things I will paste freely on the internet. I don’t know where this openness comes from. Maybe it derives from years of overexposure to gratuitous digital content. Or maybe I just like attention.
There is also a certain comfort, I’ve found, in curating a personal archive. For me, this self-collage blooms in my Notes app, somewhere to trace mementos of who I used to be and slices of who I am today.
The oldest entry in my Notes app is a recipe for banana bread. It was shared with me by my cousin during the COVID-19 lockdown, copied and pasted from a late-night text. It contains a modest list of ingredients written with inconsistent grammar and instructions to “Bake at 350 for 50 min.” Straightforward, simple.
Still, it captures months of my life experimenting in the kitchen to produce the perfect banana bread—or one almost as good as what my cousin can make. It reminds me of endlessly washing the same bread pan after my dad and I raced through a loaf, or when I finally convinced my banana-loathing grandmother to try a slice. Nights spent scraping mashed bananas from under my fingernails, my kitchen filling with the smell of chocolate chips heating in the oven.
With all the memories engraved in its lines, whenever I open that entry, I can’t help but smile.
Several of my friends have expressed that, for them, this practice of self-documentation rests in different places on their phones. They’ve discovered private affordances in social media. Some store vlogs in their Snapchat memories dating back to middle school, while others archive their posts on Instagram so only they can access their visual history.
For me, it has been a long journey navigating our current digital atmosphere, learning to sift through other people’s online lives while preserving my own. However people desire to do so, whether it’s through a safely stored Snapchat video or a deeply buried Notes app entry, I think there is a certain beauty in capturing pieces of ourselves tangibly; in curating extensions of ourselves built on security and memory—and perhaps the occasional checklist.